# Resist False Neatness

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 76 · Part 8: Nonfiction, research, and truth

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> Do not improve reality into false neatness.

In January 2006 a website called *The Smoking Gun* published an investigation of James Frey’s best-selling memoir *A Million Little Pieces*, a book Oprah Winfrey had chosen for her book club. The site had set out only to find a mug shot. By its account, police records from Granville, Ohio, for the arrest the book describes showed a drunk-driving arrest after failed sobriety tests. The book, as the site summarized it, described a far graver case, with a plea offer of three years and a jail term of months. On Winfrey’s program later that month Frey conceded that he had been jailed for several hours rather than the 87 days the book gave, and the publisher acknowledged that the book had not been fact-checked.

Those inflations could be checked against police records. Most false neatness is smaller and leaves no record to contradict it. A writer supplies a motive for someone who never explained herself, or assembles one conversation from three, or moves a realization that came years later to the scene where it would have been tidy, or ties up an ending because the record happens to stop at a good moment. Each change makes the story better and the account worse, and in each the writer is likely to feel that it is only what the scene needs.

Reality is often ambiguous, contradictory, incomplete or unresolved, and a writer who presents a fictionalized reality as fact has broken the contract that nonfiction makes with the reader. Craft makes that easy to forget. Fiction teaches that scenes turn, setups pay off and endings resolve the work’s central movement, and those instincts are right there; in nonfiction they have to be pointed at selection and arrangement and kept away from what happened.

Herodotus, in Book 7 (A. D. Godley’s translation), reports a story told in Greece that Xerxes sent a herald to Argos, says he cannot tell with exactness whether it is true, and declares nothing true except what the Argives themselves say. His business, he says, is to set down what is told him, and “to believe it is none at all of my business.” Then he adds that “there is another tale current,” according to which the Argives had themselves invited the Persian into Greece. He leaves the two stories standing, and the reader goes away without a verdict and with an exact picture of the state of the evidence.

It is possible to overcorrect. Real events sometimes rhyme, and some coincidences are real. A writer who is afraid of neatness can manufacture mess to look honest, which is just as false, so report the symmetry that is there. Unresolved does not mean shapeless either. An ending can still land on a decision, an image or the open question itself, and the book that ends on what is known can still end. A note that tells the reader what has been compressed, merged or renamed is a different act from silence.

Ambiguity does not excuse vagueness. “Nobody knows why she left” is neater to write and no more informative than a sentence that says what her sister believed, what the letters suggest, and where the record goes quiet.

**Practice.** Pick a passage in your draft that states a motive, cause or outcome with more certainty than the evidence supports, and write the paragraph twice. In the first version, keep the neat sentence. In the second, replace it with the evidence you actually have: who said what, what the document shows, where the record stops. Read both aloud. Keep the second if it is true, and note whether anything in the passage depended on the neat version; if the passage collapses without it, it was built on conjecture. In thirty minutes you have two versions and a decision.

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Copyright © Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman. Published by Inkagai, an Algodyne Corporation product.

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